InMarketing Today

London Stock Exchange Group's chief executive, David Schwimmer, hailed the 'growing momentum' of its new private markets venue, Pisces, as first-half profit surged. Turnover rose 6.9 per cent to £4.8bn and pre-tax profit jumped almost a third to £1.3bn, with autonomous driving startup Wayve and fintech Moneybox becoming the venue's first major users. LSEG also completed a record £2.1bn share buyback and lifted its dividend 17 per cent to 55p.

The comms discipline here is worth noting. Schwimmer didn't just claim momentum, he named the customers and backed the claim with hard numbers, months after LSEG's own stock was hit by investor fears over AI margin erosion. That is what rebuilding market confidence actually looks like: substantiated proof points, not adjectives.

When your narrative needs to survive investor scepticism, pair every confidence claim with a specific customer name and a specific figure. A named user and a percentage do more to move sentiment than any amount of 'momentum' language on its own.

Lloyds Banking Group beat its own profit forecast, posting a £4.3bn pre-tax profit for the first half of the year, up 23 per cent on the £3.5bn recorded a year earlier. Chief executive Charlie Nunn unveiled a new three-year strategy, Accelerate 2030, targeting a further £2bn in cost savings by 2030 through AI-driven productivity, backed by £13bn of investment. Jonathan Pierce, an analyst at Jefferies, called the path 'a little light.'

Nunn is doing something most transformation stories skip: naming the number, the funding and the deadline years before any of it has to be delivered. That specificity is good communications practice, it gives analysts something concrete to hold the bank to. But Pierce's verdict shows specificity alone doesn't buy credibility; the market will test the mechanism, not just applaud the headline figure.

Before publishing a multi-year transformation number, run it past someone whose job is to find the hole in it. If the plan can't survive a hostile analyst's 'how exactly', the number is a liability waiting to be quoted back at you in three years.

Piers Morgan's Uncensored has raised $27m from investors including Liz Murdoch and the Reuben brothers, valuing his YouTube-based media business at about $145m. The flagship show has 4.4m subscribers, and across its network of spin-off channels reaches an active audience of 30m people a week. Morgan is targeting a $1bn valuation within five years, and argues that 'conventional television, conventional newspapers, all of these things, they've all got a shelf life now.'

Morgan didn't lobby a broadcaster for a bigger slot. He built the audience himself, then negotiated the licensing deals, including a 'seven-figure' highlights arrangement with Channel 5, from a position of owning the relationship and the data. 'I own the train set,' as he puts it. That ownership is what turned a chat show into a negotiating position instead of a rented time slot.

Any leader who depends on someone else's platform, list, or broadcast slot for reach should ask what it would take to own that relationship directly, and start building the direct channel before the terms of the rental change.